Featuring New Books by David Treuer, Wendy S. Walters, Thomas Frank, and More.
Next month offers an incredible selection of nonfiction, including work by David Treuer, Wendy S. Walters, Thomas Frank, and more.
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Savage Mind, David Treuer
David Treuer is a true triple threat as a writer: an accomplished novelist and celebrated memoirist, the book of his that captured the most national attention is something like a history, 2019’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Regardless of the form he’s working in, Treuer is, above all else, a master storyteller; and with The Savage Mind, we can now add epistolary treatise to the aforementioned list. Written as a letter to his three children (now in their late teens), the book begins with an incredible tale of reservation life that reads like a Denis Johson story, and shifts, with Treuer’s customary mix of history and memoir, into a wide-ranging exploration of the so-called American frontier, both its historical reality as a place of brutal violence and cruelty, and its dominance as a mythic imaginary suffusing every aspect of this country’s imperial project, foreign and domestic.
The Creativity Con, Thomas Frank
Fortunately for the rest of us, Thomas Frank has turned his old-fashioned American skeptic’s eye on the “move fast and break things” crowd. Long one of this country’s finest critics of the demography of power, Frank applies his well-earned erudition and acid wit to the endless post-war gallery of conmen and hucksters who’ve used “innovation” as cover for a quick-fix, cliche-ridden approach to progress that siphons wealth from the bottom to the top, and leaves most of us worse off than before.
Redemption, Lawrence Wright
Lawrence Wright is one of the great narrative journalists of our time so it is fitting—and important—that he now turns his attention to one of America’s most urgent moral issues: capital punishment. Writing about the unlikely relationship between a group of nuns and the women on death row at a prison in Gatesville, Texas (the former seeing to the spiritual and emotional needs of the latter) Wright, among other things, reveals the contradictions and injustices at the heart of the American legal system.
Dispatches From Rural America, Wendell Berry
This is an important primer of the wonderful work of Wendell Berry, who we lost last month at the age of 92. Berry, who is sometimes too narrowly typecast as “American pastoralist,” in the lineage of Thoreau and Emerson, has a down-to-earth (literally) grit and unflinching pragmatism that makes him an ideal critic of modernity. And lord knows the late capitalist moment of the last 50 years deserves all the criticism it receives (and then some).
Anxious and Hairy: The Evolution and Culture of Human Hair, Judy Wearing
You want a cultural history of body hair to have a sense of humor, and Judy Wearing’s exploration of the history, aesthetics, social hang-ups, and science of body hair understands the inherent funniness of her topic while also taking it seriously. Anxious and Hairy, at once personal and universal, is a gift to curious minds. Perfect for lovers of a nonfictional romp.
The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World, Nathaniel Philbrick
Nathaniel Philbrick is a master of historical nonfiction that reads like a novel, and the California Gold Rush is the perfect showcase for his skills. He has an enviable eye for the most vivid and fascinating characters and details (as when he described in In the Heart of the Sea, with perfect, disgusting precision, the effects of extreme dehydration). Here, Philbrick makes the compelling case that the Gold Rush essentially explains America as we know it today (thanks a lot, guys).
Showbiz! My Life as a Middle-Aged Man, Murray Hill
Murray Hill is a fixture of New York cabaret-comedy nightlife scene (triangulated to Joe’s Pub), and starred on one of the funniest and tenderest shows in recent memory, Somebody Somewhere, so we have no doubt he has lived a life full of memoir-worthy anecdotes. If you’re a sucker for an unconventional career-path story told with the charm of a showman, this one’s for you.
A Dead White, Wendy S. Walters
Wendy S. Walters is one of our best—and strangest—living essayists: a true master of writing-as-thinking. Her 2015 essay collection, Multiply/Divide hearkens way back to the continental feuilleton (see: Joseph Roth), a mode of impressionistic observation that can be both broadly political and deeply personal. In Walters supremely talented hands, the one is never far from the other.
And now, with A Dead White, we really get to see the world the way Walters sees it, specifically, its infinite white spaces (and we’re not talking about country clubs and Cracker Barrels). One day, while dropping her son off at school, Walters started to notice the ubiquity of white paint in our lives—and once she started, she couldn’t stop. As Walters observes in A Dead White (which is somewhere between a monogram and an essay collection devoted to a single subject), the ubiquity of white paint in all our spaces, public and private, reveals so much more about societal value systems than we’d care to admit, about our passive choices and our wrongheaded aspirations to self-serving (and false) “neutrality.” You will never look at a white wall the same way.
The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia, Richard Cooke
If you’re old enough to remember when using Wikipedia as a source was the height of laziness and have come to regard it as an indispensable tool, a genuine delight, and a force for good in a very bad place (the internet, the world), you likely don’t need to be convinced to anticipate this book. Richard Cooke digs into Wikipedia’s beginnings and inner workings, and makes the case for its vast import—likely greater than even its dedicated users appreciate.
Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching & Power, Helen Betya Rubinstein
At a time when writing feels threatened in so many new and exciting ways, it’s tempting to circle the wagons and shut down dissent from within. But Feels Like Trouble serves as an excellent reminder that dissent can be enlivening. Rubinstein examines the frameworks and methods we take for granted as writers and students (see the workshop standard “compliment sandwich”). “Provocations” is right there in the title, but Rubinstein’s explorations are deeply considered, well argued, and, even when you disagree, extremely fun to read.